I mostly lost the ability to cry in the 90's (side-effect of Prozac, or just coincidence I don't know), but in the last couple of months I've shed a lot of tears while sitting in meditation. I get really opened up, and eventually I start feeling deep loving compassion for myself. That makes tears. Or I have a momentary glimpse of how much *everyone* is suffering due to the conditions of their mindbodies, and that makes tears. Or I see how strong and loving they are in the face of their suffering, and *that* makes tears.

They aren't exactly tears of sadness, and sometimes they are tears of love. When I do metta meditation ("may I be happy, strong, full of effort & compassion. May I find ways to share my happiness with others...") tears of beauty can fall.

Meditation is a strange practice. I sit on a cushion for an hour, and my mind parades its carnival-like garishness for 55 minutes. For 5 minutes the spectacle might slow down a bit and I become engrossed in watching the breath or bodily sensations. Perhaps for 5 or 10 seconds, if I'm lucky, all mental verbalization stops and it's just profoundly quiet. In short, I'm not particularly good at one-pointed concentration.

And yet the practice works. The ugly cognitive distortions of depression and anxiety lose a little force. Instead of the harsh language I sometimes use to address myself ("cunt, faggot": words I don't use on others even in extreme anger), I start addressing myself with love ("darling, I'm here for you"). I don't really do this consciously, and it's certainly not some kind of self-improvement trick. After trying to sit equanimously with my body sensation for long enough, love arises. My internal voice gentles.

For the most part, that love is still primarily self-directed. I have inklings of compassion towards others, but it's not easy for me yet to follow through on them. But I do recognize that my happiness is contingent on learning the dilligence to be strong and centered for others.

I cried during my August meditation retreat to think that I'd spend the next year and a half learning to skillfully touch people who are in pain. Learning to let the very flesh of my hands press down through skin and muscle and connective tissue, and help bring back circulation, un-set adhesions, stimulate hormones, and all the other physiological and emotional benefits of skilled touch. I started getting kindof attached to that idea of myself-as-healer till I saw the folly of it.

It's strange getting attached to the idea of being a massage therapist while practicing a meditative discipline that trains one to be cool towards bodily sensation. Much of the pain and fatigue I experienced while sitting up to 11 hours a day in meditation was due mental restlessness, and once I recognized this, the pain and fatigue transmuted into mild annoyances at worst.

Massage only treats at most an inch deep into the physical body (plus physiological after-effects), while the root/radical solution for alleviating physical and emotional pain seems to me neurological or psychological. Massage is a band-aid, and sometimes the wounds we try to cover require the mental equivalent of arterial cauterization. If not heart transplant.

Still, there is need for band-aids too, and there is need for feel-good touch. A lot of people don't get touched at all, let alone skillfully. It's fanciful egotism on my part to want to have deep healing impacts on people. It will suffice to merely touch them.

I've deferred massage school for a semester. I need to do more deep healing of myself first. I need to shed more tears on the meditation cushion, and learn to cultivate ardent habits of mindfulness and compassion. I will be spending the semester working at two meditation centers: one of SN Goenka's Vipassana centers and Stone Circles, a center for social justice activism and spiritual training.

I can feel so beautiful and empowered and full of potential when I sit in meditation with regularity. It's a wonder that I let my practice die these past two weeks, but I'm back. With a lot of help from a lot of people (authors I haven't met, one author I did meet, a meditation teacher who called me today, friends who themselves sit or have provided space for me to sit, the list is long...) I'm back on the cushion.

saul williams' niggy tardust is 'really good™'. that's officially my rating. 4/5 stars, something like that. you should know that means i like it enough that i'm going to have it on incessant repeat on my stereo, my mp3 player, my mind, for the rest of the week and then some. it's right up there with NIN's with_teeth and year-zero, and a step/giant-leap below The Downward Spiral, or Led Zeppelin (the album), or The Wall.

at first i thought it was too obviously crammed with reznor's year-zero soundscaping. but i get it now. saul and trent are a very organic fusion at this moment. Trent can write very intense lyrics when he's picking at his own emotional scabs, and while *he* doesn't get close to that level of power when he's trying social commentary, that's what Saul's all about.

So I don't think Niggy's sound is a case of trent not being able to sound like anything but himself, even when trying to make a hip-hop album. "Niggy" isn't Trent trying to do hip-hop. It's more like an in-between sequels, alternate take of year-zero. It's an iteration of year-zero. it ought to have a halo number. Saul's lyrics, notwithstanding their frequent use of "NGH" (which is often ironic at two or more levels), could easilly have formed the semantic content to year-zero. you might have to listen to Niggy a bit slant to hear that, but that's only fitting: saul's diction is down with dickinson's idea of truth and divinity.

Download it at niggytardust.com

funny addendum: my CD changer just tracked off the end of 'Niggy', and onto NIN's "Broken". Till the lyrics of "WiSH" kicked-in, I didn't quite notice that we'd switched discs!

New York Magazine interviewed Trent and Saul (unfortunately mostly about the distribution model rather than the music). Trent confesses to putting his money where his mouth his [when asked how much he paid for Radiohead's in rainbows]: "I bought the physical one, so I spent a whopping $80. [Pauses.] But, then I re-bought it and paid $5,000, because I really felt that I need to support the arts, so people could follow in my footsteps."

In One City: A Declaration of Interdependance (kindof a Meditation 101, for the iPod generation), Ethan Nichtern confesses: Sometimes I have to mindfully watch myself fall into the damaging rut of a particular habit around twenty million times before I begin to not crash into it so easily. That's a potent demonstration of free will, if you ask me. Making a decision between soda A or soda B might be the working of free will, or of random chance, or of ribonucleic pre-destiny. Who knows? But if one can watch a habit that's so ingrained that one continually falls prey to it despite wanting desperately to change, and over the course of so many failiures that any reasonable empiricist would declare defeat, notice an inkling of change, well that my friend, is the power of will prevailing over habit, destiny, or hard-wiring.

There are many ways in which I fail to change myself. Reminding myself of them just might make a difference on the twenty-millionth iteration:

1. I'd rather sit at a bench as a pipette-monkey, potentially helping a lab learn something new, than be a code-jockey
2. I'd rather clean droppings out of the Baboon exhibit at the zoo (that's a reference to David Brin's Earth by the way), in the company of (and with access to) vets, wildlife biologists, conservationists, scientists, and general students and lovers of The Creation, than be a pipette-monkey.
3. Meditation is a powerful agent of both change and acceptance for me. It is demonstrably, for me, The Answer. I hardly ever practice it with the zeal that I apply to physical training like skating or martial arts though. That's bass-ackward.
4. Mind matters most.
5. connecting with others is deeply important to me. I find it easiest to connect through writing. So why the fuck am I not making my writing more important in my life than just leaving behind a trail of throw-away blog postings?
6. much more to come

After several translations, it still makes sense:

Mind proceeds all phenomena,
Mind matters most,
Everything is mind made.


If within an impure mind,
You speak or act,
Suffering follows you,
As the cartwheel follows,
The foot of the draft animal.

If with a pure mind,
You speak or act,
Then happiness follows you,
As a shadow that never departs.

- First words of Dhammapada

When I read that as a kid it sounded frightening: "follow moral authority, or karma will punish you". When I read it as a college student, it sounded simplistic: "don't drink, don't fuck, don't masturbate, or else. Or else what? Or else some force that doesn't exist will punish you using mechanisms that are physically impossible and for reasons that are psychologically suspect". I hadn't discovered meditation yet. As a meditor, it reads like "Just observe: your possibilities are far far beyond anything you can concieve, and so keep watch on your own limitations, moment to moment, welcoming them with love, till they fucking dissolve. Momentarilly. Or perhaps not at all, this time. Just Observe".

I feel slightly bad that I didn't write in support of the Chocolate naked Jesus Figure "my sweet lord" whose display in a NYC hotel's art gallery has been stopped.

Businesess in NYC can, with impunity, use Buddha heads in bars, spas or other completely non-religious contexts, and New Yorkers seem to be savvy enough to realize that these decorative elements don't somehow invalidate Buddhism. Some Buddhists, my Mom among them, probably would be a little skeeved by the practice, and she'd certainly have a problem with a chocolate naked Buddha. Probably such a statue would have been taken down just like the "my sweet lord" was.

What exactly is the problem though? A chocolate Buddha would be quite in keeping with the Buddhist tenant of impermanance: when Buddhists offer flowers at Buddha statues, they are making the point that all things, like the pretty petals, are subject to decay. Nakedness just emphasizes the corporeality of the human form. A chocolate naked Buddha would be a fitting embodiment of Buddhist ideas.

"My sweet lord," probably doesn't have any such theological justification in Christianity, and yet why would anyone object to its being displayed? It's not "Piss Christ", (which itself I'd argue was a rather intriguing image, and not the same as, say, putting a Jesus figurine in a urinal). Chocolate is made from Cocoa, whose scientific genus name "Theobroma" means "God's Gift". Nakedness is, well, the original sinless state in Eden. God's own form, if one takes literally that God created Humans in hir own image.

Sigh. People jump so quickly to see theological insult where none might be. God, assuming sie created anything, created shit and shit-beetles people. It's only the puny minds of Homo sapiens that think that chocolate or nakedness could insult Jesus, or those who follow his teachings.

OK, I'm not as naive as all that. This is about power. The Christian community tests and demonstrates their cultural power by getting the exhibit closed. Perhaps it's fortunate that the non-christian community doesn't care enough to flex their power. Perhaps it's unfortunate that we let a good idea get sentenced to death and buried in the name of religion.

Since I wasted time reading the NYT most e-mailed article, which was about the science of religion, I might as well share my reactions, which I conscientiously wrote up while reading, thinking the article would be worth the many pages it was printed on. Ultimately, the article fell short of expectation. Studying the evolution of religion is interesting, but it's both harder than, and secondary to, studying the science of how religion, brain, and culture intersect in today's world. Whether or not religion was evolutionarily adaptive is independent of how religion affects practitioners and non-practitioners today. The biological evolution of religion is also an incredibly complex study, and valiantly try as the author did, sie could not do it justice in the space provided hir.

Indeed my favorite part of the article had nothing to do with the topic of religion; it was the ( biographical note about how Atran decided to become an Anthropologist )

And now, my reactions to some the article, which if they are worth anything, will convince you not to waste even more of your time in reading the full text of the NYT Magazine piece:

( "To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.”" )

Begs the question of emotion. If emotional attachment evolved first, perhaps belief in afterlife eased the emotional transition at times of death, which might have otherwise led to non-adaptive conditions (depression, or perhaps shying away form future emotional attatchment). Perhaps, *cognitive* religious belief is an epiphenomenon of *emotional* realities?

( "An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold." )

Ok, but first part of this (swaying, singing, bowing…) talks about a practice that isn’t nec. Linked with religion. ALSO “religion" is too big a word. Need to discern various functional components of it operating at different levels (physiological/fMRI, logical/cognitive, social, emotional). If studying evolution of “religion” need to look at evolutionarily primitive aspects of religion, not modern ones. Studying developmental psych is important, but don’t confound childhood psychology with psychology of adult hominids evolving religion (or the physiocultural infrastructure for it).

"…according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel."

Non-sequitur from biological group selection to cultural evolution.

"Even if Wilson is right that religion enhances group fitness, the question remains: Where does God come in? Why is a religious group any different from groups for which a fitness argument is never even offered — a group of fraternity brothers, say, or Yankees fans?"

Exactly.

"Even some neo-atheists aren’t entirely opposed to religion. Sam Harris practices Buddhist-inspired meditation."

Hello? I bet some atheists practice yoga too. Does that make them “unopposed to religion”?

"No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition."

How does that follow from the rest of the article? Does the writer truly belive this, or was sie explicitly trying to please hir readership, or was sie unwittingly impelled to make a theistically defined poetic conclusion to an article about “the human condition”?

Check out the second page of the comic that Neil Gaiman posts an FYE about: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/for-your-enjoyment.html

OK, down to business:

Here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination make the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival".~E.O. Wilson, The Creation

Apparently biologist Richard Dawkins new book, The God Delusion, is a bestseller. My apartment-mate is reading it. Unlike prior books of Dawkins', which described biology, albeit sometimes with decidedly unapologetic arguments against religious objections to evolution, the current book seems to be a polemic against religion's foibles.

In apparent contrast, another star biologist, E.O. Wilson, has written a book titled The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. Some chapters are written in the style of a letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor. Despite what Wilson says are irreconcilable differences, he maintains that he speaks "in a spirit of mutual respect and good will", sharing "many precepts of moral behavior". "Perhaps," he continues, it matters "insofar as it might still affect civility and good manners, [that they] are both Southerners".

Perhaps indeed; while Wilson repeatedly maintains that he is being respectful, much of the book goes on to lay out ecology and evolutionary biology, rather concisely, but in terms that seem to dispense with any literal reading of the Bible, "would God have been so deceptive as to salt the earth with so much misleading evidence?". I suppose it's a Southern thing that two people can completely disagree with each other with smiles on their face and respect in their handshakes?

Why bother? Well, the creation needs taking care of, and Wilson finds that religion and science are the most potent forces able to do so. Perhaps once the ashes of the straw man of intelligent design have been interred, the two forces can find commonality again: the world is wonderful in its workings and we humans really ought to be more respectful of it.

I haven't read it all yet, but Wilson, writing very much from the heart, seems to lose the thread of the argument at times. At such times it seems like yet another biologist writing in praise of nature and pleading for wise conservation. The word "creation" in the title seems to just be marketing -- what enables Wilson to publish redundant information.

But humans don't act on information alone. Al Gore's film succeeds because it invokes emotion. Wilson is very aware of this, and finds it to be the answer to why humans at putting creation in peril. Whence his fanciful quote of the wise alien observer of earth's evolutionary history perceiving H. sapiens as a chimera.

Wilson includes chapters on how to learn and teach biology (big, cross-disciplinary principles first, details to follow) and indeed a chapter on "how to raise a naturalist". Wilson tries for inspiration, and hits the mark at times: "Commit yourself. Returning to passion as the driver of learning, a teacher's dedication is most effective when expressed through both the art of teaching and the demonstrated love of the subject for its own sake... students seek their personal identity, but they also yearn for a cause larger than themselves... Nature is a theater for which such mental development is inherently suited".

Reasonable people would do well to read the Pope's speech, or at least the allegedly offensive part of it, before weighing-in on the matter. Neither yahoo news, (which seems to favor inflamatory reporting on this topic) nor the one newspaper website I've looked-at so far, bother to link to the Pope's original text. The Holy See site doesn't highlight the text either, although I'm sure it's there if I knew what to look for.

As for the radicals who are burning effigies, bombing churches, and promissing violence, well, they and their supporters are culpable for the violence that the US armed forces are currently inflicting on both the innocent and the deserving. I don't think that we in the US, with our knee-jerk revenge on the country of Afghanistan, or our pre-emptive strike on the country of Iraq are all that far removed from the Jihadists. The difference is that we are too civilized to advocate directly participating in violence ourselves. But put under the rubric of a war on terror, it all seems quite reasonable to us. I'm sure the Jihadists feel the same about waging holy war.

I'm not advocating do-nothingism in the face of terrorism. I'm not letting either the Jihadists or the war-hawks in our own country off the hook either. Nor do I have much sympathy for so-called moderate Muslims who stand idle while the radicals are off shooting bullets in the air and burning the Pope in effigy. If moderate Muslims are the majority in the supposedly "peaceful" religion of Islam, there ought to be an overwhelming voice of millions that is denouncing radical Islamist rhetoric. At least in the US, we hold peace rallys and protests on both sides of the issue.

I am, however, profoundly gratefull that Al Gore did not gain power. If he'd been in charge during 9/11, we'd have been looking at 16-20 years of solid militarism, no matter how he'd have handled it. As it is, with the hawks in charge, we might pull back in the next two presidential terms. And I do think that overdoing militarism, in the case of 9/11, was less harmful than if we had under-done it.

An excellently written article in the Washington Post on the Ladies Figure Skate paints a picture of Sasha Cohen that brings out the attributes I really like about her. Yeah she can skate, but so can others. Athletic excellence is often an inspiration; it's one of the more potent demonstrations one sees of how dedication and hard work can transcend its own fruit and soar into being a celebration of human ability: the four minute mile, eric heiden's five golds, michael johnson's near-perfect 200m, michael (yeah, that michael), bruce lee, and many more. It's rare that such feats make me into a fanboi though, because a moment of physical perfection, or even a career woven of such moments, say little about an athlete's personality.

The '06 winter games, for me, will be identified with Sasha Cohen. This is certainly not to take away from Shizuka's grace and seemingly effortless jumps. What really gets me, and lights a fire in my heart is how Sasha skated an excellent program after a fall and stumble that surely would have denied her a medal. It's a key metaphor for me, because I fuck-up a lot, but would do some really good things if I just stayed focussed and kept going forward.

Figure skating is a dramatic sport: the area where skaters await their results is called the kiss and cry; there are primadonnas like Johnny Weir, and media darlings like Michelle Kwan. It's an athletic soap opera, blown out of all proportion by the media. It's easy and fun to get caught up in all this, and I have to admit I did so.

It's good to have heroes who can stoke emotional fire. I had a very intense yoga session yesterday, and I became aware if this fire again. I am so much more. So much more than a guy who lives to blog his life; who always avoids eye contact with strangers; who lets the world distract him from his purpose. It's not perfection I need, but a relentless rededication of the type that can win a silver medal after a huge mistake.

Johnny Weir is into the finer things in life: caviar, filet Mignon, designer clothes, staying in hotel suites rather than slumming it in the Olympic Village. In this context the two final quotes on the favorites page of his website are quite striking:

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
-- Tolstoy
"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."
-- Tolstoy

What is the delusion? Thinking that that which is beautiful must be good; or thinking that only good things can be beautiful?

What is beauty? There's an incomprehensible beauty to Sasha Cohen's skating; she does what all the other women do, and yet when she attains a spiral it seems an utterly different creature to what the others have done. This beauty and grace won her first place for her short program. It was a different beauty that won her a silver medal overall, even after two falls in a shaky free skate (AKA long program). Grace may be beautiful, but it need not be good; Lucifer (and his incarnation as Sauron and Melkor in Middle Earth) was the most graceful of all the angels.

Other things that grace can be beautiful. In Sasha's case it is tenacity: despite chronic inconsistency and a fever she achieved greatness at Nationals (her performance there would surely have won gold at Turino; despite two early falls in her free skate that should have put her out of medal contention altogether, she skated the rest of her program with every breath full of the perfection she'd have shown if she were still skating for gold. Yes, she continued to smile and skate well like all athletes of her caliber do after a setback, but it was more than that which won her the silver; her soul did not give up. This added beauty to her that wouldn't have been there if she'd skated perfectly. Beauty in that skating rink today was not in being good or even great. It was in winning by failing.


Selected quotes from sasha's website that reinforce why I'm so gaga about this woman:

What is your greatest fear?

Loss of purpose, sense of self.

What is the trait you most dislike in yourself?

Doubt.

What do you consider among the greatest virtues?

Genuine kindness and personality.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Self-pity.

What is your most marked characteristic?

Determination.

Who are your heroes in real life?

Everyone who has triumphed over themselves.

What is your motto?

Reach for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll land in the stars.

The last is such a cliche. And yet it is precicely what she did today.

I wonder how many generations back one has to go, on average, to find shared ancestry between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews? Would DNA evidence of this relatedness have any impact on the animosity between the two groups? Not likely at all.

DNA evidence purportedly shows no recent Hebrew ancestry among Native Americans, which has some LDS theologists worried, as the book of Mormon says that there should be.

DNA evidence is also being used by African Americans to trace their ancestry back to Africa, sometimes with unscheduled stops in Europe along the way.

See anthropologists for info on the latter two items.
( will we come to a more nuanced understanding of race and culture? )
Will science and theology co-evolve? In the future, will brainscans suggest which church a child may prefer? In some of these churches, will the concepts and symbols used to inspire awe accord with science? In such an environment, will literalist religion still have relevance for some? Has science already exceeded the threshold of public understanding, having become so ramified into specialities that future discovery and education won't radically change the current standoff between naturalism and faith?

Anyone know of any really good sci-fi that explores these issues?

A few odds and ends that have stuck to me, like burrs, during after today's websurfing:

From an interview with Beanbag, a Christian rock group:

JFH: What bands have influenced your sound?

Hunz: *grin* Heaps! Every member in beanbag has their own sound that they bring to the band. I listen too a lot of Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Trent Reznor (NIN), Seal, Underworld, DJ Sasha and everything electronic at the moment.

I -- well, I -- umm, I really dig that his musical mind is open to Tori and Trent, who would probably rub many hardcore American Christians the wrong way.( I'm not saying that songs like Crucify or Closer are necesarily anti-religion ) Marketing makes Judases of us all, I guess.

Upset that I gave Fiona short shrift in the previous paragraph? This one's for you, apple-lover (from an Oct. '05 interview):

SFJ: The second record—I’m curious if you actually can say the whole title.

FA: I could: “When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight And He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring ( Read more... )”

Is it me, or does that sound like something Eminem could have written for 8-mile?! Homegrrl can rhyme!

"No, I really don’t want to give any advice to a nineteen-year-old, because I want a nineteen-year-old to make mistakes and to learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes—just make sure that they’re your mistakes. Because they just feel a lot less crappy, and they’re just easier to get past."

Did she really say "make mistakes" five times in a row?

My goddess would come in a wrapper of cellulose, green and barren. A destroyer, and lover of decomposing things. A fierce mother who consumes all to provide a mulch for her children. A mother without compassion (for what am I to her but a mere atom among galaxies), but one whose every shift in time and change of hue sings of love and asks for my devotion.

My goddess isn't real. She is flesh and heat and sweat from a night's panting embrace. She is number and ratio. She is the maggot meat at the end of the road. She is me as I am not, me as I have not become, me as I can only hope to be. She is my imagination.

My goddess laughs at me. How dare I invent her! She enfolds multitudes, millenia upon millenia, the buzzing encephalogram of an entire planet, and I dare to imagine I know her. She laughs at me, and then (in my own mind of course), urges me forward like a mare who licks her foal to life. Within all the grandeur of life, room can be made to accomodate one more amusing ego.

My goddess demands no sacrifice, asks for no devotion (what use has a body for the sacrifice and devotion of a mere cell). And besides, it's absurd for a figment of my imagination to ask for my devotion. And it's for this reason -- that she recieves my love in return.

inspired by David Brin's Earth.

The following quote, from an interview with Jimmy Carter in the CSM, had me in stitches:

Asked how his views of Christianity differed from those of Mr. Bush, the former president said, "I wouldn't want to criticize President Bush's Christian faith.... I don't have any doubt he is very sincere about his Christian faith."

But what followed was pointed. "I have a commitment to worship the Prince of Peace, not the price of preemptive war. I believe Christ taught us to give special attention to the plight of the poor. In my opinion this administration, I am not talking about President Bush personally, has committed itself to extol the advantages of the rich."

Jon Stewart eat your heart out.